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Among the many things that are coming into focus as an unforeseen challenge to every business that had to suddenly ramp up their Ecommerce efforts last year is “packaging”. We haven’t covered it in detail yet, but it did create some serious issues in many DCs last year, both for outbound shipments and the inbound returns. While it might seem like an afterthought in the big picture of running a warehouse, it can be a surprisingly big problem that impacts productivity, customer satisfaction and even your space management.

How well did you feel your team handled the “pandemic pandemonium” in 2020? More than any other year we can remember, there was a yawning gap between the “winners and losers” across different industries, bases on a standard measure of revenue. But among the biggest “winners” on the demand side were many messy backend operations that were not prepared for the 2020 surge and struggled to keep up with the pace of shipments, returns and more.

In 2020, more businesses discovered the benefit of “cutting the cord” with their electric outlets and putting their devices and workstations on carts fitted with powerful batteries. Mobile Power gave them the benefit of bringing their devices to their work, rather than wasting footsteps and other movement.

Among many of the challenges that 2020 forced so many businesses to solve was how to not just create a direct-to-customer fulfillment operation but to optimize it and standardize the processes enough to make it seem like less of the scramble that it was when all of this started almost a year ago. One specific process that was a common challenge for many businesses in 2020 was the Picking Process.

With the disruptions in supply chains all over the world making headlines in mainstream news channels, it’s a good time to revisit some basics on Supply Chain Planning (SPC) given that we now see a lot of businesses being forced to devote a lot more attention to this critical skill area than they may have before – because they did not have to.

As we have learned from managing the Ecommerce boom in 2020, the adrenalin of ramping up adequately to get hundreds – or thousands – of shipments out every day also has a “hangover” feeling that comes from the Returns process.

How has your business responded to the rapid changes in the distribution and logistics industry this year? Chances are that the rapid evolution of your processes and how you supported them are not just a band-aid for making it through to 2021, but the blueprint for your current and future facilities well beyond this crisis and into the future.

It’s hard to imagine during the heyday of lead acid batteries that anyone would have thought something called “Battery Day” could be seen as a futuristic, sleek, design-savvy symbol of innovation. But in case you missed it, yesterday September 22^nd was the annual Shareholder meeting for Tesla, an event they have branded as “Battery Day”, and is used as a showcase for new innovations, ideas and plans coming out of Tesla.

If you are like thousands of other businesses around the world this year, you probably can check off at least one of the boxes below:

• We had to figure out how to do E-Commerce for the first time.
• We previously dabbled with E-Commerce, but suddenly had to get good at it.
• We’ve been doing E-Commerce for a while, but this year broke all our records.
• Our Returns Process is messy, expensive and hard to manage to customer expectations.

If you’ve checked off either of the first two boxes, you probably needed to check off the last box too.

Back in March when it became clear that we would be in for a very unpredictable year ahead, we were quick to point out that anyone who was not already good at E-Commerce would now need to be or disproportionately suffer from the slowdown in activity. Four months into the crisis, that seems more true than even we had considered.